In a spiritual world of quick fixes and vague emotion, is it crazy to believe there is still a place for insights based on simple, basic, theological understanding. I believe it is worth exploring.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Fear of Lack of Meaning

One of the most basic fears of modern times is that life has no meaning. Having lost the idea that there is a God who made the world and is concerned about us, we are frequently left with an idea of meaninglessness. We can feel we are merely white rats stuck in a maze or computer circuits in a large machine. And we can try to define ourselves or create meaning for ourselves. But this is a hopeless endeavor. We can no more define ourselves or create meaning for ourselves than we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps with no bootstraps. It all becomes a meaningless game. This fear is one that Christianity speaks to very directly. It says there is a God who loves us and sent His Son to save us (Romans 5:6-8; John 3:14-18; 1 John 4:9,10) if we put our faith in Him (Romans 4:4,5; Ephesians 2:8,9; Philippians 3:9). This results in God working in our lives to carry out His purposes in the world (Ephesians 2:10; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Colossians 1:28,29). This gives us a goal of doing good to others (Galatians 6:9,10; 1 John 4:11,12; Romans 13:8-10). God's saving grace has the ultimate goal of our being with God forever (John 10:27-30; 1 John 5:11-13, Romans 8:38,39). This gives meaning and context to our lives. But it is easy, even for those who have trusted Christ, to fall back into this fear of meaninglessness. So we need to remind ourselves of who we are and what our purpose is. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it. For we need to avoid falling into the void of meaninglessness that characterizes our culture.